This is as much a game essay as a review, so strap yourselves in if you are up to it! Otherwise, skip ahead to the last two paragraphs for my suggestions.

Overview

Padma is undeniably weak, seeing almost no play in Standard. Even at the peak strength of Shapers, when they had access to cards that seemed synergistic with her like Endurance or Trickshot, she was consistently beaten out by Lat, Arissana or even Wu or Kit. This review will explain why she’s weak, how she could’ve been better designed and how she still can.

ID abilities can generally be thought in terms of 3 factors: payoff, play-pattern and deck-building requirements. What kind of cards do you need to include in your deck, what sort of play-pattern do you need to pursue to trigger your ability, and what is the reward for doing so?

Generalists

Speaking anecdotally, the most widely played IDs tend to have generalistic payoffs with lenient requirements.

Take Hoshiko for example, she gives you card draw and credits, something almost every deck can benefit from, while only requiring you to touch cards every other turn. Thus she can work with almost anything, Reg Anarch, Mulch, ICE destruction, etc., all can benefit from money and cards, and all want to run at least occasionally.

Lat is similar, almost all Shaper decks can benefit from clickless card draw and matching hand-size with the corporation requires almost nothing of you in deck-building and doesn’t greatly restrict your play pattern. Thus Lat can be played with a variety of archetypes, in the days of Endurance and Rezeki, he was the face of control shaper, in the days of Trick Shot and Deep Dive, he was the ID of choice, and when Aesop’s Pawnshop/Coalescence was the best engine, he could still slot in just fine.

Combo

By contrast, combo IDs tend to see relatively little play (unless their combo is busted), and be extremely confined to their specific play pattern.

Tāo, for instance, almost only ever uses Hermes, because the synergy with his ability is too great and he is currently best served by the Conduit/Aeneas engine, because he usually has to tunnel on a single server that he continually weakens in hopes of finding another agenda in time to snowball further. However, when properly locked out, he lacks the lateral options available to other IDs, he’s limited by being unable to reliably choose when and even if agendas will be scored or stolen and his ability does little against asset decks that play few ICE and combo kill decks that don’t plan to score out at all.

Similarly, Mercury usually runs few, if any, icebreakers and relies almost exclusively on finite, bypass tools to “cheat” their way through not just some of the corporation’s ICE, but all of the corporation's ICE. They then plan to win off a critical mass of multi-access supported by tools like The Twinning, “Pretty”, or WAKE Implant. But, much like Tao, they lack the flexible and strategic tools to control the flow of the game should they get unlucky, or get locked out.

Midground/Archetype Players

Most IDs fall somewhere in the middle and their playability is determined by how much value their ability can generate relative to how easy it is to fire said ability, as well as how good the cards in the archetype they belong to are.

Arissana is generally considered a good example, here, we can see the three components, Arissana requires Trojan synergies in deck-building, which lends her to a unique, trojan-centric archetype best played with her ID, she requires you to run often, something that is not-hard for aggressive runners and rewards you with clickless installs at a minimum, or game saving counter-play in a pinch (reactively installing a Hush, Slap Vandal, Botulus or Physarum Entangler can be game-saving). These reactive installs also enable her to be more aggressive with her runs, which is important for a high-tempo, run-based ID.

Padma is similar in theory, she requires you to include cards that can be charged in the deck building stage, and thus should be the best ID for any power-counter centric Archetype. Her play-pattern requires making regular runs, not unlike Arissana or Hoshiko in theory. And the pay-off is the power counters themselves, which have variable returns but can often be used for some amount of card-draw (Dr. Nuka Vrolyck), credits (Coalescence), multi-access (Cataloguer, WAKE, Twinning), breakers (Revolver, Propeller, Lobisomem) or utility (Hippocampic Mechanocytes, Poison Vial, Amelia Earhart). All in all, this seems fine, the biggest catch is that unlike these other IDs, Padma’s ability only fires when you run R&D.

The Problem with Padma

This is a bigger problem than you might initially think, locking your ability into a single server is a crushing limitation because of the counterplay it opens up to the corp. Against the other aforementioned, run-based IDs corporations would need to ICE up every server, a multiplicatively more difficult requirement than icing up just a single server. Because if you heavily ICE up one server against say, Arissana or Hoshiko, they can simply pivot and attack the new weakest server while still getting value from their ability. Whereas once R&D becomes unrunably expensive, should Padma pivot away from it, she is now playing with a blank ID box, a horrible situation to be in.

Furthermore, because her ID lacks in built protection like Arissana has, Padma is vulnerable to bad facechecks on R&D should she try to run into a facedown piece of ICE on turn one. She’s especially vulnerable, even when compared to conventional run-based decks like Criminal that try to force rezzes before they’ve installed any cards because Padma needs at least one card installed to use her ability on, simply increasing the number of potentially tempo-negative face-checks she could make.

There's a very good reason that ID design has moved away from server-specific abilities over its history, FFG era netrunner often included ID abilities that targeted a specific server like Gabriel Santiago, Steve Cambridge, Akiko Nisei or Silhouette. But NSG broadly recognized, correctly in my opinion, that these limitations are best placed on specific cards, not fundamental IDs, and you can see the fruits of these learnings in modern ID design. Zahya's ability works on HQ or R&D, as does Mercury's, Sable has to run a specific central server, but that server changes from turn to turn, so you can never truly know where to place ICE to lock her out for good.

The decision to ignore all of these learnings when it comes to Padma and limit her ability to only work when running R&D confounds me as I can't see a good reason to place this limitation. It's like if Arissana could only install Trojans on ICE protecting R&D with her ability, or if Hoshiko only got to flip if she accessed cards in Archives, it just wouldn't make any sense and would be extraordinarily constrictive.

The Solution

My opinion, now more than ever, that we've had a good chance to see how Padma operates in the standard meta, is that Padma’s ability should read “The first time each turn you make a successful run, Charge 1 of your installed cards.”

This would make Padma’s gameplay so much cleaner and smoother at every stage of the game. On turn one, Icing up R&D is no longer so debilitating, because she can still run HQ and get a risk-free power counter. Even once HQ and R&D get iced up, you can still run Archives for a safe supply of power-counters, equivalent to clicking for 2 credits with Coalescence or 2 cards with Nuka, or preemptively charging up your multi-access for once you find your breakers.

In the mid-game, where you need to run the remote to keep the corporation in check, you can still generate an incidental power-counter to refund you some of the cost. If you need to sweep HQ on an important turn, you still get a power counter, if you need to run Archives to keep Jinteki honest or flush out a Spin Doctor, you still get a power counter. Even in the late game, where you might want to run R&D to close things out, you can still get a power counter, only generating that power counter once the run is successful, is a minor downside, but if anything, this is fairer than getting one when the run begins. Not to mention the fact that this reworded ability makes orthogonal game-plans like assets much more playable for her.

Ultimately, it would enable a far more "natural" style of Netrunner, one that incidentally rewards you for making the kinds of good runs you would want to make anyway, rather than attempting to force you into this awkward play pattern of "tunneling" on R&D.

How to Achieve it

I know why NSG does not do functional errata, but I want to propose an alternative solution to this problem. Create a Booster Pack, with maybe only 5 or so cards, such as this reworded version of Padma, reword Daeg to say something more like “The first time this game you install a card named Daeg and whenever an agenda is scored or stolen, you may Charge 1 of your installed cards.” Tweak the numbers on Nanuq or Tunnel Vision to give Shapers or Criminals a new playable AI, reprint Virtuoso but with 2 Memory instead of just 1, and maybe reprint Nanisivik Grid but make it unique, or give it "remote server only". Call the whole thing the “Borealis Reprint Booster Pack” and give everybody who buys the next standard release cycle a copy of this booster pack, free of charge, that way you can easily disseminate these reprinted versions to everybody who is still into Netrunner (plus worst case scenario people can just proxy the new versions from print-and-play).

I strongly believe the Charge mechanic is underutilized and with the Borealis cycle recently released and not rotating for years to come, I think there’s a strong argument to be made that these underplayed or banned cards deserve a second chance while they’re still young. Just don’t reprint the Boat lol, I think this version of Padma would still be good without it :D

Despite the enthusiastic and optimistic reviews you may read on this page, this card sees no play and saw no play historically outside of being a cheap sacrificial hardware during the days of World Tree. This review exists as a post-mortem, to break down what this card does, why it sees no play, and how similar cards can be better designed in the future.

As I see it, there are two fundamental and interlinked problems this card faces:

1. It is niche (it's a tech card)
2. It is exhaustible

Tech Cards

Being a tech card is in and of itself a limitation, tech cards will always see comparatively little play due to their niche applications when compared to something universally good like Sure Gamble, Diesel or Bravado, simply because money and card draw will always have value against every match-up while techs will, by their very nature, have fluctuating returns. Still, tech cards have their place and similarly worded tech cards for preventing damage and "when encountered" effects have seen play historically such as Hunting Grounds, Feedback Filter or Caldera.

Notably, Airblades does put some pretty serious restrictions on itself, preventing only net damage (not Core or Meat) does limit it's applications and those limitations are exacerbated by the only during run condition, so while it might mitigate the sting of Anemone or Urtica Cipher it won't help against Bladderwort, Reaper Function or Mindscaping nor will it do anything against Thule Subsea: Safety Below or tag and bag.

Still, in the matchups where it's useful, it can be quite useful, if you can prevent 3 net damage throughout the game, Feedback Filter and Caldera tells us that's worth about 3 credits of value per damage for a total of 9. And similarly, if you can prevent 3 on encountered effects like Tollbooth, Mestnichestvo or Funhouse then that should save you a similar amount of money, for a profit margin of 8, which is exceedingly good when compared to convention econ. It's so good, in fact, that in the matchups where you would want this card, such as against certain Jinteki or NBN decks, you'd probably want to include two or three since just one will quickly run out...

Exhaustible

This is where the second problem arises, all of these historical tech cards I've listed are infinite, while they might cost credits or have limitations like only being usable once per turn, they will never run out. If you are expecting a damage-heavy meta, you need only include one Feedback Filter and the money your deck already wanted to include to achieve protection, in fact, with sufficient drip economy or a Magnum Opus rig, you can outlast even the grindiest deck, causing them to deck out before you do. In it's heyday, Hunting Grounds was a popular one influence splash outside of Apex because you could pretty reliably expect it to cover it's install cost after just a couple of important runs and the longer the game goes on the more and more incidental value you'll acrue. And, critically, worst case scenario you play up against Weyland and have one dead card in your deck, or two if you felt the need to run both damage protection and Hunting Grounds.

But with Airblades, you feel pinched, in the matchups where you want this kind of effect most, you'll probably want 2 or 3, since just one will quickly run out, but in the matchups where it's useless, you want 0 as they're just dead draws. The tension of this hurts Airblade's viability from a slots perspective, as it doesn't do enough as a 1 of but isn't consistently valuable enough to warrant 2 or 3 slots.

Alternatives

Ultimately, the best tech cards are slot effienct, either simultaneously solving a multitude of common problems in one card, like how Pinhole Threading deals with Anoetic Void, or Manegarm Skunkworks or The Holo Man or Clearinghouse or Rashida Jaheem and so and so forth. Or provide incredible value throughout a game, i.e. when playing against Tollbooth, Hunting Grounds functionally drips 3 credits per turn without capping the returns at 8 credits. Or provide an alternative benefit outside of tech, i.e. having "fallback" value.

Most Shapers today will prefer to play a card like Stoneship Chart Room, which elegantly deals with all types of damage threats. So too Anarchs prefer to play Steelskin Scarring and Criminals The Class Act since these cards all provide both damage tech and alternatively thin your deck, making it more efficient, not less, in the matchups where you don't need damage protection.

Redesign

If I had to redesign Airblades without fundamentally changing it, my first order of business would be to let it recharge itself, such as gaining a power counter the first time each turn a successful run is made, by letting it self-replenish, you can feel comfortable including just one of these, knowing it can last you the whole game, without wishing you had a second copy, the instant the first runs out. To compensate, you might want to increase the install cost to 2 or 3 credits, and/or have it start with only 1 power counter instead of 3.

If this wasn't enough, you could start expanding its applications, perhaps a third option where you can spend a power counter to jack out or remove a tag, like a rechargeable Flip Switch. Or simply expand the damage protection to include Meat or Core damage and remove the only during run condition. Or you could reword the second ability to include other nasty ice abilities, like preventing "when rezzed" effects on Unsmiling Tsarevna, Ablative Barrier or Stavka/Hafrún or when encounter ends effects like Anansi or Phoneutria.

I'd be much more comfortable including a tech card like this version of Airblades that recharges itself and provides a multitude of uses against a wide variety of matchups, than the current version which is both highly specialised and painfully finite.

At the time of writing, NSG has been quite clear that they don't do errata for accessibility reasons, which I completely understand, so don't hold your breath for a new version of Airblades coming anytime soon. Rather, let Airblades serve as a lesson for future designers, on the pitfalls of tech cards, and how to ensure playability.

I feel like this card is half of a combo that doesn't exist yet.

Obviously, it has applications in damage mitigation and safety (an overarching theme of the Borealis Cycle). You can offset the lasting downsides of Core Damage, making it harder for Thule to set up a kill with just a single End of the Line. And, with just a pinch of Charge support and a healthy dose of card draw you can keep yourself safe from even double End of the Line MAD combos.

However, this card has drawbacks, namely the self-damaging effect and reliance on Charge synergy to make the most of it. Unlike Stoneship Chart Room or No Free Lunch which have no drawbacks and can be cashed in at minimum for a little bit of credits or card draw.

Rather, this card needs something to synergize with it, something to offer you more value than just hand size for the sake of not flatlining. Compare how Anarch decks will play Steelskin Scarring regardless of whether they are expecting damage or not because of its inherent synergy with all of their trash cards.

Hippocampic Mechanocytes feels like it needs something akin to this, something like Game Day (which has rotated) or a runner version of Your Digital Life to give you some payoff for having a large hand-size or large number of cards in hand, to warrant playing this card outside of a hard-core (hehe, get it) damage tech.

This will be a long review so strap yourself in or skip ahead to the TLDR at the bottom.

I'm going to analyze this card from 5 interconnected perspectives.

1. Political Assets on the whole
2. How this card fits within Weyland
3. How this card fits within non-Weyland Archetypes as an import
4. How runners can and should think about and play around this card
5. Theming

Political Assets

First introduced in the Mumbad Cycle with the four cards (one to each Corporation) Bio-Ethics Association, Clone Suffrage Movement, Sensie Actors Union and Commercial Bankers Group, Political Assets were mired in controversy and poorly received (though in fairness that may have been the Mumbad Cycle's general funk more than anything else, or just IG being IG). Now they're back, for the first time in forever in the Liberation Cycle with many returning features such as one per Corp: Front Company, Warm Reception, Federal Fundraising and this card right here, as well as all sharing their 2 base trash cost and having a special effect that's only online when un-iced. However, there are some differences, such as having half their effect always active, and half of it only active when un-iced, presumably so that you can ice them if you want but are still incentivized to leave them un-iced.

I dislike Political Assets on a fundamental level because the only three archetypes that can synergize with Assets that are cheap to trash and can't be Iced are 1. Asset Spam, 2. Prison, and 3. Upgrade Hell. None of which are my preferred style of play, but since no one else has deigned to write a review for this card you're stuck with me for now.

To give the devil his due, Federal Fundraising and Hearts and Minds aren't that bad. Federal Fundraising preserves NBN's skill for R&D management but tones down Sensie's card draw power while only rearranging the top of the deck (thus preventing the Corp from burying agendas on the bottom of the deck) and still leaving the Corp vulnerable to deep R&D digs which Runners will appreciate. At the same time, it also allows Epiphany Analytica: Nations Undivided to set up its click triggers and know when to use their ability, which they will greatly appreciate, all around a solid but not overwhelmingly powerful Political Asset. To convince you that Hearts and Minds is more interesting than Commercial Bankers Group I need only show you the cards, anything is more interesting than "gain 3 credits."

That being said, nothing can make me love Front Company + Warm Reception, IcyHot has scarred me too deeply I'm afraid.

Weyland

Unfortunately for Weyland, Asset Spam isn't its strong suit at the moment post Gagarin Deep Space: Expanding the Horizon, I've yet to see Prison Weyland either and the main Upgrade Hell deck, Venti Ob puts all it's upgrades on R&D not on Assets. It will show up occasionally in Facet Ob, but it's often used for just a single trigger before being fed to a Svyatogor. If you're looking for a value-based economic Asset then most Weyland decks go for Regolith Mining License or Wall to Wall which is like a supercharged PAD Campaign so long as it's the only rezzed Asset on the table which thus actively disincentives Weyland Asset Spam. Most Weyland decks of today thus prefer either Vertical Glacial, Rush or Combo Kill none of which have much use for this card.

Jinteki and Pravdivost (NBN)

Perhaps the most promising application of Hearts and Minds lies in Shell Game and Asset-based Combo Kill (I know what you're thinking, YiPpEe!) but I'm here to give you a review (and honest advice) and honestly, you can do some nasty things with Hearts and Minds.

Placing one advancement counter on a piece of ICE may be meagre value generation, but when combined with traps it becomes a whole different ball game. Suddenly, your failed bluffs from Urtica Cipher and Cerebral Overwriter become batteries for advancements counters, which HaM (Hearts and Minds) can reposition, while adding an extra counter of its own. Together, you can never advance a 5/3 off the table without needing to pre-advance it with Mitosis and at a fraction of the cost of The Holo Man. Now, every install, not just the double advanced ones, becomes a potential threat, you can throw an inconspicuous, unadvanced 5/3 onto the table and score it out the next turn for just 4 credits (including the rez-cost of HaM) so long as you have an unchecked Urtica Cipher lying around from a previous Mitosis.

This also works with kill combos since you can boost a Ronin or Clearinghouse at the start of your turn, allowing you to present a surprising burst of damage the runner may not be expecting or prepared to absorb. All in all, generating an advancement counter and flexibly moving one from an old trap to a new real threat is something these kinds of decks would love to have access to since it opens up so many deadly play lines and flexible and surprising kill combos. And remember, this card isn't unique, that's right, with two of these as well as just one double-advanced Urtica Cipher and one double-advanced Clearinghouse you can send a whopping six meat damage at the runner on the start of the turn. Since it's all simultaneous, Steelskin Scarring won't save them, nor will Aniccam.

The biggest problem, without question, is Influence, Trap decks are, by their very nature, tight on influence, since traps are spread around between the factions they often need to import cards like Cerebral or Clearinghouse from other factions, Pravdivost often feels the need to import Urticas from Jinteki and even if Jinteki doesn't import Chekist Scion they still usually need some Spin Doctors and maybe a The Holo Man or two. This leaves precious few Influence points to import HaM for a whopping 3 pips per copy. This... is probably for the best, because if this card was 2 or even 1 influence, let alone if it was a Jinteki card rather than a Weyland card, I'm terrified you would see this card everywhere.

I have seen a weird BtL deck that tried playing traps but while they might have this card and Clearinghouse in faction, they have the exact same problem of needing to import everything else just to have even a small fraction of the lethality of a Jinteki deck.

Runners

Trash on sight.

That's it, at two credits to trash there are very few good reasons not to trash this card. Furthermore, Standard currently has an abundance of Asset Tech, including, but not limited to, Miss Bones, Scrubber, Paricia, Fencer Fueno, Imp, Cupellation, Hannah "Wheels" Pilintra and Marathon. Most competitive runner decks I have seen include at least one and sometimes multiple of these cards. When you have the option to trash assets, sometimes clicklessly and sometimes with conditional "fake" credits then you simply have no excuses to leave this on the board. Most decks don't play this card, which just tells you that any deck that does is about to do something wild with it.

Now, I'm not saying check every unadvanced card on the table against PE, how you deal with PE is between you and whatever god you believe in, but what I am saying, is that as soon as this card is rezzed, if you've survived whatever horrific combo they've just pulled off, then trash this card, so that they can't just pull off another.

Thematic

Easily my favourite thing about this card is the theming, which is wonderfully colourful and rich.

To take the low-hanging fruit, the mech in the picture bears remarkable similarities to Working Prototype, right down to the "thumbs up" pose. I don't know whether multiple corps have been developing their own mechs in competition with one another or whether Weyland just purchased one from HB and gave it a fresh coat of paint but either way, that's a super cool reference that ties these two cards in together.

As for CEO Braganza, you can find her depicted on the Nuvem ID art and further referenced in the extended The Basalt Spire quote. To extrapolate beyond that, we know that the Braganza's were a wealthy and powerful Portuguese royal family, formally the "Most Serene House of Braganza" who ruled Portugal and Brazil from the Renaissance period through to the formation of the first Brazilian Republic in 1889. Whether CEO Braganza is a descendant of this family, or whether the name is meant merely as an allegory, it's a very interesting reference. The last emperor Pedro II was deposed by the military and political elites in a bloodless coup that was motivated, in some part, by the fact that the emperor had abolished slavery the year before and in doing so cost the slave-holding elites dearly. Read into that what you will...

Beyond this, the art is gorgeous and places us right in the middle of a violent riot, which is very on point for a set entitled Rebellion Without Rehearsal. The quote is not only pertinent for the plot of the story and often true, but it's also a great tie back to the Braganza name itself.

Besides all that, I think it's fair to say that Weyland has captured our Hearts and Minds. Sure, they might seem like mad supervillains sometimes. But they're more like that kind of loveable supervillain, you know, the one that's so laughably evil that they end up giving you money instead of actually causing you problems. And even when they've been bad, they know how to give it the human touch to make everything alright again. Sure they are evil, but they're evil in the same way Megamind's evil, they like the tension, the chase, the back and forth of fencing with Runners, it's not like they're actually trying to kill! the Runner. And even if they were trying to kill the Runner, they look so badass while doing it, like John Wick! They've even got their own Mission Impossible Team for dealing with all those pesky cyberterrorists. I mean, how can you not like Weyland?! They are the best!

TLDR: An interesting Political Asset that can advance already installed cards at the start of your turn, the floor of its power is just advancing your ICE for free but that's a pretty mediocre effect compared to some of the alternatives in faction. Its real power lies in never advancing large agendas cheaply and setting up nasty kill combos. Best used for its full effect on the turn that it's rezzed because it's probably not going to last long after that.

I have no idea why this doesn't have a review because it already shows in up 2/3s of Anarch's decks at the time of writing so here we go.

It's a card draw engine, with complexities, that can make it hard to read and hard to estimate so I'm going to break it down into 3 components:

1. Draw a card once per turn (specifically on the Corps turn)
2. Do so only if the corporation has installed a card in the root of a server
3. You must trash one card off the top of your deck

First off, drawing a card once per turn is frankly amazing, it's what makes Hoshiko Shiro: Untold Protagonist one of the best Anarchs and what makes Lat: Ethical Freelancer one of the best Shapers. In Lago's case, it's also somewhat reminiscent of MaxX: Maximum Punk Rock if that's your sort of thing. It's worth noting that outside of ID abilities, most card draw is finite, Diesel, Steelskin Scarring, Moshing even card draw you install often runs out like Dr. Nuka Vrolyck, Earthrise Hotel or The Class Act (though Class Act is a bit more complicated).

For this reason, the best analogy is Verbal Plasticity, which also functionally gives you one extra card draw per turn (assuming you click to draw at least once). At a glance, it's easy to argue that Verbal is better, it's less conditional since you can choose to activate it instead of relying on your opponent to do something, and it doesn't require you to trash your own cards at random, sure Lago's a credit cheaper and doesn't require the continual investment of a click but still, the flaws clearly outway the benefits right?

Wrong! This card is amazing! Precisely because it trashes the top card of your stack, not in spite of it. That's not inherently intuitive looking at this card in isolation, to understand why we have to look at the kinds of other cards Anarchs regularly include in their deck

1. Buffer Drive offsets half of the downsides of this card, since you can recur every card trashed off the top of your deck if you so choose. Since Lago technically triggers on the Corps turn it satisfies Buffer Drives "once per turn" phrasing, which means you can use Buffer Drive to recur cards trashed by Lago and still use it on your turn to recur cards trashed by Moshing, The Price, Patchwork, Bankhar etc. Not only that but you can choose not to recur cards instead, so if you trash a dead draw that you didn't want anyway, you can just leave it in the Heap to give you a distilled, high value second half of the deck (the opposite of Class Act where your worst draws end up clumped together at the bottom of your deck)

2. Steelskin Scarring and Strike Fund, I'm grouping these cards together because they do something very similar to each and always show up together, and by always so up together I mean they're in every Anarch deck. Since Lago trashes the top card of the deck, there's a substantial chance that whenever Lago fires, it doesn't just draw you a card, it actually draws you 3 cards, or a card and 2 credits, a nice little surprise bonus that propels you forward more than Verbal ever can, since it doesn't interact with any other cards to give you that extra value. With the help of Buffer Drive, you can do this combo multiple times per copy of Strike Fund or Steelskin if you draw through your deck multiple times.

3. Aniccam Anarch is another reason to play Lago, Aniccam Anarchs have been rising in popularity recently and I think Lago is a big reason why. Whenever you trash an Event with Lago, you'll clicklessly draw two cards with Lago instead of one, which is crazy good. And like Buffer Drive, it has a "once per turn" trigger meaning it can draw you two cards with Lago on the Corps turn and still draw you another card on your turn off of playing (or trashing) any event. If you trash a Steelskin or Strike Fund it starts to get crazy good, since you could end up clicklessly drawing 2 cards and gaining 2 credits or even clicklessly drawing 4 cards!

4. Labor Rights / Ashen Epilogue. Even if you don't want to include Buffer Drive, or if you want to install Lago before you've found your Buffer Drive then having additional sources of recursion can be very useful to salvage the most important cards you happen to trash, or recur your entire Heap back into your deck to repeat the process again. Either way, recursion always pairs nicely with decks that are prone to trashing their own cards

With all this in mind we can see that with the proper support and setup, Lago is not only as good as Verbal Plascitity but has several notable upsides and factional synergies that Verbal lacks. And since many of these cards are already common or becoming more common it's really not much of a deckbuilding burden to include Lago anyways.

That being said there are a couple limitations I want to discuss for completeness sake.

1. Per-turn effects - These are naturally better the longer games go on and the sooner you can get them started. For this reason even the identical text would be better on an ID than a Resource, once again that's part of what makes Hoshiko and Lat so good, and why someone like Smoke was worth more than just another Cloak. However since IDs and Resources innately take up very different deck slots that's less of a problem and more of an observation, and I've even seen decks with built-in card draw like Hoshiko or Loup play this card in addition to their innate card draw. Additionally, as the meta can be rather fast at the time of writing with PD games or Reeducation Azmari games being as short as 6 turns it can be hard to generate consistent value from slow cards like this over burst card draw. But that also means that this card will likely only get better if the meta slows down even a little (due to Rashida's rotation, for example). Lastly, you'll want to install this card as soon as possible, but that's not much of a problem since Anarchs are happy running three copies of a unique card an then just feeding the "dead draws" to cards like Patchwork or Moshing.

2. Counterplay - Generally you don't want to give your opponents much of an opportunity to counter-act your plans, this is part of why Wildcat Strike sees limited play while Sure Gamble is ubiquitous. Giving your opponents the option to mess up your plans if able is generally a bad idea and since Lago only fires if your opponent does something, that can be a drawback that causes it to fire less consistently than once per turn. Notably, it checks if something is installed in the root of a server, so that includes Upgrades on centrals and Upgrades or Assets in remotes. Taking a turn off installing ICE, playing Operations, Advancing an Agenda or using a card ability like Regolith Mining License won't trigger it. Furthermore, you can "batch" installs together, since Lago can only fire a maximum of once per turn. While this is some counterplay for the Corp, most Anarchs can put on enough pressure that denying them a Lago draw is the least of your worries. And several Archetypes like Rush or Asset Spam require you to install something pretty much every turn, with the occasional turn off to score an agenda. Meanwhile, the kind of decks that can afford to take turns off from installing cards in the root of a server (like Glacial) generally play slower and make games last longer, which gives you more "opportunities" for Lago to fire. Thus, Lago can provide a deceptively consistent amount of card draws over the course of a game. Though the pace and pattern can be very inconsistent and it's for this reason that I wouldn't recommend relying on this card as your only source of card draw.

Lastly, Seb does have some bonus value he can derive from this card since it is a 2-credit connection that he can install clicklessly for free off of taking a tag. But otherwise, it generally works pretty well in any Anarch deck.

I wouldn't recommend exporting it to any other faction as it's nowhere near as good without all the support cards I outlined (especially Steelskin and Strike Fund), and importing a full playset of Lago, Strike Fund and Steelskin Scarring is going to set you back your full 15 influence, leaving no room for Buffer Drive or Ashen.

Thematically, Lago Paranoa Shelter looks like a kind of animal shelter that Seb and his family/friends also use for meetings and other "insurrectionist purposes" or just generally hang out there it seems. Lago Paranoa means "lake Paranoa" in Portuguese which in turn literally translates as "lake sea cove" as derived from Paranoa River, it's an artificial lake in the capital of Brazil, Brasilia where much of the Liberation Cycles story takes place. I'm somewhat unclear as to the ludonarrative intent here, why does the corporation installing something cause the runner to trash something and then draw and what does that have to do with an animal shelter on the shore of a lake? The Corporation doing Corporate stuff incidentally hurts citizens and animals but then Lago Paranoa Shelter helps them get better perhaps, it's a bit tenuous and I'm struggling to follow along but there you go. I don't particularly like the art, I can't quite put my finger on it but it just sort of creeps me out. Anyway, that's my problem.

TLDR: This card is somewhat unintuitive, and it can be hard to appreciate its power, but in the right "trash-forward" Anarch package and with the right support cards, it can be an absolute powerhouse of clickless card draw and value generation.